Episode 6: From Documents to Digital Thread: PLM Lessons from Aerospace and Turbine Engineering with Sergei Irisov

In this episode of the Share PLM Podcast, we are joined by Sergei Irisov, Head of IT & Digital Transformation at ZeroAvia. 

Sergei Irisov is a technology and digital transformation leader working across engineering, manufacturing and regulated product development environments. His work focuses on PLM, ALM, ERP, MES, IT governance, lifecycle traceability, manufacturing readiness and digital operating model design. He has led international IT and digital transformation teams and helps engineering organisations connect technology decisions with operational discipline, product lifecycle control and scalable execution. 

At ZeroAvia, Sergei is helping drive digital transformation within a company developing full hydrogen-electric engines for existing commercial aircraft, while also supplying hydrogen and electric propulsion component technologies for novel battery, hybrid and hydrogen-electric air transport applications.

During our discussion, Sergei shares valuable lessons and perspectives on these key areas:

⚉ From Engineering to Digital Transformation
⚉ The Human Challenge Behind Digital Transformation
⚉ Why a Common Vocabulary Matters
⚉ Connecting Digital Transformation to Business Goals
⚉ Breaking Down OKRs and Measuring PLM Success
⚉ Speaking Both Engineering and Business Languages
⚉ AI Adoption and Cybersecurity Risks
⚉ Measuring the Return on Investment of AI
⚉ The Value of Multicultural Experience
⚉ Sharing Lessons Through YouTube


MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE:
⚉ [Book] Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari - https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/dp/0062316095 

CONNECT WITH SERGEI: 
⚉ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/irisov/ 
⚉ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SergeiIrisov/videos 

CONNECT WITH SHARE PLM:
⚉ Website: https://shareplm.com/ 


Join us every month to listen to fascinating interviews, where we cover a wide array of topics, from actionable tips, to personal experiences, to strategies that you can implement into your PLM strategy.

If you have an interesting story to share and want to join the conversation, contact us and let's chat. We can't wait to hear from you!

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

[00:00:11] MARIA MORRIS:
Hello Everyone, and welcome to the Share PLM podcast. I'm Maria Morris, business development manager at Share PLM, and I'll be one of your co-hosts for today's episode. And joining me, as always, it wouldn't be the same without him, is my fellow co-host for today, Jos Voskuil. So Jos, please, can you tell us a little more about who's joining us today and what we have to look forward to?

[00:00:35] JOS VOSKUIL:
Okay. Hi, Maria. Yes, today I'm very excited because we have an interesting guest, Sergei Irisov, head of IT Digital Transformation at ZeroAvia, and he will tell us soon more about his career and the current work experience. But I'm so excited because it's the first time in this podcast that we have a guest with rocket science.

What can rocket science bring us in the domain of PLM? I'm curious. Therefore, a warm welcome to Sergei. Thank you for joining this podcast episode. And please, Sergei, introduce yourself, a little bit about your career journey.

[00:01:07] SERGEI IRISOV:
Hi, Jos. Hi, Maria. Hi, everyone. Very pleased to be here. My name is Sergei. I am at the moment serving as a head of IT and digital transformation at ZeroAvia, a company which is building a hydrogen electric powertrain for the aircrafts.

As Jos already mentioned, I started my career as an engineer, then gradually moved or shifted from the engineering background towards the digitalization within the engineering space, and now I'm overseeing the whole IT of the business, including the cybersecurity and a few other topics.

[00:01:43] MARIA MORRIS:
Very interesting. Thank you for that great intro, Sergei. Maybe to kick us off, you can tell us a little bit about how it was a rocket scientist comes to work in the domain of digital transformation and product lifecycle management.

[00:01:58] SERGEI IRISOV:
Yes. As I started my career in parallel with the getting an education, getting a degree, I quite quickly realized that actually these art of the engineering, which I was hoping to have during my career, is not actually a main point or main time-consuming point of the work, and predominantly, or at least a good half of the work is going towards following the procedures, filling up the papers, and following the change management and approving it.

I started to think about whether there is any chance I can help myself and help the others to improve that somehow, and maybe at least to remove these papers and put everything into the electronic environment. But then it turned out that there are special systems that you can work with, which is a product lifecycle management environment, and at that point of time, we already had quite an experience with CAD during the education and during my work as well.

When it comes to the rocket science degree, it's about the complicated technologies in general. So obviously at the moment I'm busy with the deep tech industry, which means that the product is quite complicated, so you cannot just fill in the folders in your folder structure and live with that because it's not only about you, because you need to prove to the certification authorities and to the other authorities that your product worth producing, manufacturing, and put into the market.

And that's how I ended up working out what is PLM and how it does work and starting-- started my career at a consultancy firm which was providing us services for such companies as, uh, where I was working.

[00:03:39] JOS VOSKUIL:
Okay. Sergei, you seem like a, a very structure person, like I was also in the beginning of my career. I was a teacher in physics and mathematics, and I thought also if you make everything clear, your analysis also of the business, then it will start running.

But then, of course, I also in my career, I discovered the humans. Humans are not so logical, and they also are part of your career. Can you tell us something about your day in the life at ZeroAvia and your interactions with systems, with people? What are the challenges there?

[00:04:09] SERGEI IRISOV:
During my past career before ZeroAvia, or maybe even a bit more before that, the experience was quite ordinary. So I had people from the same culture, and I worked with the people from the same culture, and it was quite simple to explain things to each other, to use the same vocabulary. But here at ZeroAvia, at some point, we had people from 25 different nationalities, which brings a lot of different cultural context.

And it is really brilliant because people not only bring the cultural context, but also a way of solving the problems from the different perspective, which is very useful when you are organizing the work of the team efficiently, but quite destructive if people are not thinking about the same kind of mission within the company.

[00:04:52] MARIA MORRIS:
Yes.

[00:04:53] JOS VOSKUIL:
Okay. Can you give an anonymous example of this? Of these culture issues? You don't have to mention names.

[00:05:01] SERGEI IRISOV:
Yeah, so I guess it would be better just to start from the same vocabulary. So basically if we will tell that we have an aim towards the project, and we must deliver as soon as possible, for someone that means, like, regardless of the quality, we should deliver, but someone are trying to keep the balance still and fill in those quality gaps while we are building, going in parallel, which is disrupting the project on its own and maybe pushing it towards the right side, but this is the place where the conflicts are coming.

o the understanding of the quality from the different perspective is sometimes vital for the project when it's different cultural contexts.

[00:05:44] MARIA MORRIS:
Yes, definitely. And Sergei, when you've had these kind of points of resistance or maybe friction based on people's different levels of understanding, in this case quality, what have you done as a leader to actually try and bring people together and get them, as you were saying, kind of talking the same vocabulary and starting from the same level of understanding?

[00:06:05] SERGEI IRISOV:
As soon as I realized that we have a pretty broad cultural context within our company, I was at the point of internal audit to understand the current situation as is and build the strategy throughout the next few years. And I started from just reaching out as many people as possible who are obviously making the decisions and helping the project to progress.

And I was trying to explain to each and every person with his own vocabulary the importancy of the project, the importancy of the IT domain on its own, and that actually a very personal approach. So each and every time, sometimes you need to draw a picture, sometimes you need to discuss the wording, and sometimes you need to send the message instead of speaking to person privately, and that really depends from person by person.
 
[00:07:00] JOS VOSKUIL:
Right. You have the cultural aspects, but also we, we mentioned many times vocabulary, and I think that's also one of the important points I every time mention in implementations. Make sure you have a common understanding and vocabulary that everyone speaks the same language. And one of the very interesting examples I had from 15 years ago at a very primitive company, I was meeting the PLM team in the corridor, and they said, "We're now busy implementing system engineering."

And I said, "Wow, you're already quite advanced," because looking at their, their business, nobody did system engineering. But then when we sat at the table, it means they were doing change management, and they called it system engineering, and that was one of my lessons learned here. Make a vocabulary, write down what it means, because it's so important with especially the, the multicultural environment.

[00:07:49] SERGEI IRISOV:
Yes, for sure. What I understood the easiest way to explain those things is going through the different industries, Industry 3.0, Industry 4.0, Industry 5.0. So those are the layers that you cannot miss, so they should be implemented one by one, and this is something that we started from. So basically, we first of all try to understand the picture to be, so what are we going to be in three or five years?

And obviously, we wanted to have all those AI and Industry 5.0 concepts implemented. But at that point of time, after the audit, I realized that the as-is situation is actually not even full Industry 3.0. So we haven't got any full, like, digital threads implemented or some of the points, some of the processes were not digitalized at all, so we could not see the very basic traceability, and we haven't got any basic visibility on the processes.

[00:08:46] JOS VOSKUIL:
Right, and here you mention again that that in one way, if you look at the as is, it's already not even on the level as desired, and meanwhile, people are talking about level four and level five, eh, et cetera.

How are you going to address those differences? How do you get people on this journey to look for it? Do you have any special tricks or methods for that?

[00:09:06] SERGEI IRISOV:
Yeah, so it's a very simple motivation. So basically for the business owners and for the senior stakeholders, it is something that you are rolling backwards. So basically, okay, what do we need to have? In order to have this, we need to build this because of some particular reasons.

And in order to have at least some kind of analytics, we need to have at least the basic visibility, because without the basic visibility, we couldn't do nothing. And that's a really simple thing to sell if you know the way.

[00:09:34] JOS VOSKUIL:
Yeah. It's easy to sell, but do you have a certain methodology, that framework that you say, in every company you should do this, this, this, and this? Because that's where people are looking for, I think.

[00:09:44] SERGEI IRISOV:
Yeah. So it will depend on the mission of the company. It will depend on the OKRs of the company. But all in all, all the companies are trying to be as lean as possible, and especially when it comes to the scaleup or the startups, we were growing from the startup to the scaleup at that point of time.

It was about the quite quick scaling, and at the same time we haven't got much people. So this was one of the reasons why we motivated the senior leadership to pay a bit more attention towards the IT in general.

And the second thing is when you are trying to understand the core OKR of the company, you are just rolling that back again, right? For example, if we would like to have a certification at that point of time in 2027, for example, we need to have all those things pointed out. Without this, business wouldn't be reliable and business wouldn't be viable. And that motivates a lot because in other companies, for example, I'm bringing ZeroAvia as a core example, right?

In other companies, for example, we have like tens of thousands of people, or at least hundreds of people doing the same job, but we are few hundred all in all for the whole company, and that's what motivates a lot. Because these days people think that AI will fix everything, but unfortunately it's not always like that.

[00:11:01] MARIA MORRIS:
Yeah, and I think this is an area where many organizations that we support when it comes to their transformation journey, their introduction of PLM, sometimes struggle what KPI should they measure, what OKRs.

And I think from your experience, obviously you've always been led by the mission, as you said, of the company that you're working with, but how do you then break those OKRs down into the more operational level to kind of measure the success of your PLM program, the transformation? How do you go about doing that and setting the right KPIs?

[00:11:34] SERGEI IRISOV:
Yeah, so that's a very good question. We were actually quite struggling with this thing to break it down properly at ZeroAvia for good six months with the whole team, and that was a number of round tables with the other teams. It was a lot of internal discussions trying to understand how we can break it down, and that's a very complicated question.

But if you put it correct, it will have the 50% of the answer. So if you put the question correct, so what do we need to do in particular? So we must do this and this. We can do this and this. And if we will broke it down into the priorities, the half of the answer would be in the question already.

[00:12:17] MARIA MORRIS:
Yes.

[00:12:18] SERGEI IRISOV:
And the next part is just trying to understand our own capabilities and budgets and all those things, and combine them all together.

[00:12:25] MARIA MORRIS:
Yes. Jos, I'm going to jump in because I'm sure you have a great answer/question, but I actually wanted to bring this back to you because I think you have great experience supporting organizations and, and maybe you can tell us a little bit as well from your experience how people should measure the success of PLM.

[00:12:42] JOS VOSKUIL:
Exactly, and before jumping on that, I just want to focus on the point that what Sergeitells is very interesting. He talks about we discuss, et cetera, and this is typically the startup company or the scale-up company where everyone knows each other still. They're focusing on all the products, and everyone is in the mood of improving the business and to go to the market.

So in a startup environment, you always have this enthusiasm, which big enterprises at the end fail if they already exist 150 years and they've always done it this way.

And I think that is also where your leading question comes from, Maria. I mean, what I hear from ZeroAvia, they know each other. They are a team. They are not at scale of the ten thousands of people, and if you are in a large company, then the challenge comes first, where do I put my vision? And can I translate my vision into a story that energizes everyone?

I don't know if you have read Yuval Harari, and he talks about the importance of the myth, creating a myth that if you want to align more than 150 people, you need to have a compelling story that people believe in.
I don't know, Sergei, are you already in that level, creating myths about ZeroAvia for the future or you're still able to discuss within you in, in your work environment?

[00:13:58] SERGEI IRISOV:
In our company, people are quite inspired by,  when they're starting working in the company, they're already inspired because our CEO actually is a very inspirational persona. So he is building the company for a great future with a great mission, and he obviously counts that the company would be one of the biggest in the world and will disrupt the whole industry.

And that actually a fifty percent of my job done around this myth, because at the end of the day, if you have a great company to build, you have a great system to build for it.

And that actually my motivation as well. So when I started the journey with ZeroAvia, it was exactly about that. So I was hoping that I would help to disrupt the industry. Maybe not disrupt it myself, but help to disrupt the industry of aviation and help the zero emission strategy to implement a bit faster.

And that's what I was trying to sell to, to my team and to senior leadership as well, but they were already bought in by the CEO.

[00:15:04] JOS VOSKUIL:
And did they like you as an IT guy and digital transformation guy? Because the focus is on product, and here is the guy that comes to tell us that we have to digitize, that we have to create a digital thread. Where did you feel your mission or your, your challenge?
 
[00:15:18] SERGEI IRISOV:
That's always a very hard thing to sell, and when you're a part of the consultancy, it is a very hard job to do. But when you have an engineering background and you're a part of the team, that's completely different story. Because one of my kind of pluses or advantages is that I'm speaking the engineering vocabulary studied from my education, right?

And that's my focal point while I'm discussing things with engineers and aligning, uh, strategy with them. And that helps me to sell and at the first place, uh, sell the idea, and at first place to understand them to do that. So that's an easiest way, and without the engineering background, it's really hard to do from my perspective.

[00:17:07] JOS VOSKUIL:
And then the other side is the money side. You have your engineering well connection, then you have to connect to the business. How do you do this? We talked about KPIs, et cetera. How do you translate the engineering demands to business?

[00:17:23] SERGEI IRISOV:
Yeah. So from my perspective, this thing was the reason why I was hired in particular. I guess that from my position as a PLM manager initially, the company was looking for a person who can admin the particular application. But then it turned out that I'm also partially doing the business motivation as well because of my client-oriented approach raised in consultancy at early years of career.

And what is being bought by those people from the business is the result/money balance. And each time when you're talking about the decision or solution, you're not thinking much or not presenting much of the technology. You are mostly operating with an option/the budget for the particular option, and keeping the balance between the people to hire and between the service to outsource, and keeping the balance between the different options of ready-to-go solution or build something on your own, and so on and so on.

And each and every time you're speaking the money language, and that's what consultancy gave me, and that's what I guess is appreciated in the company as well.
 
[00:18:36] JOS VOSKUIL:
Exactly. I think that's the, the most important thing of a good PLM consultant, being able to speak in both worlds and to connect or translate them.

[00:18:45] MARIA MORRIS:
Yes. Great, and Sergei, what I wanted to ask you next is obviously you have some great experience in the consulting field as well, so not only just purely working on software and solution. And one thing that we really try to do when we're supporting organizations with their PLM journeys is really not only, as, as Jos was mentioning at the beginning, creating a shared vision that people can get behind and, and feel seen as part of that vision and kind of know what their role is going to look like at the end of this and how they're going to evolve, but also making sure that they feel part of the solution definition as well, so that they actually feel like they've had a say in what the outcome of the program is.

Is that something that falls into your responsibility as well, trying to co-create a solution with your stakeholders?

[00:19:36] SERGEI IRISOV:
Yeah, for sure. So that was a part of the plan from the very beginning, as we haven't got much of the resources within the team, so I was the only person in the IT team for the first 18 months, and we still wanted to proceed with the implementation.

I decided to choose a strategy of finding eight champions in each and every team, who I spoke with much more than with the others. And although the team was, uh, quite disconnected because of the difference in the time zones and geographically as well, but having those champions was helping a lot because they were building the core of the requirements because they not only knew the process that they follow, but they also knew the system a bit more than the others, which helped a lot.

So basically, I've tried to find people who had a previous experience working within the PLM environment and people who keen to know more or have a various experience within the different systems as well. But sometimes it is not enough because working within the environment is not the same as building the environment.

And for some people, it is quite complicated to step a bit aside and look through the system and try to understand the requirements, how the system was built, and why those functions were implemented.

[00:20:48] MARIA MORRIS:
Definitely. That makes sense. And when it came to actually deploying the system to wider use, so obviously you'd co-created the design of the solution with your champions. I'm sure they probably went through a, a testing phase during that as well. But when it came to actually deploying the solution to all of the users, what was the kind of onboarding or training approach that you took? Was it a train the trainer with the champions, or how did you go about that?

[00:21:14] SERGEI IRISOV: 

So I served as a trainer at consultancy firm for good two years, and I more or less understand the process of the onboarding.

So at one point, for example, with one customer, we had an experience when at the very beginning of the project, before everything started, before the requirement specification is approved, we've ran through all of the courses, all of the necessary courses on the admin side using, understanding the strategy with all of the, with the whole IT team who are involved in the project.

And after that course, which was about 10 days long, 10 full days, we changed the approach completely, and that was a definitely different type of success we had achieved with those people. But unfortunately, not everyone are willing to pay the money from the very beginning, right? And pay the time, in our case, at ZeroAvia, to invest in the training courses.

So having, having the same amount of low resources on the people side and the, on the budget as well, we've used the same approach. So basically, I was training the champions, and champions were training their teams on their own while they're working on the go.

[00:22:25] JOS VOSKUIL:
So here I have a interesting topic to discuss. We haven't talked so much about AI.

[00:22:22] MARIA MORRIS:
Mm. How could we forget?

[00:22:32] JOS VOSKUIL:
Yeah, we couldn't forget it, and in here as in my speech, I said, one of the advantage of AI for startups is that it takes away a lot of, I would say, boring work, maybe regulatory compliance work can be done by agents, so people could really focus more on creation than on, I'll say, managing data.

How is this happening in your company? Because I think they are the typical candidate to show this statement that I made. If not, then it's my wrong statement. So, uh, what do you see? Can AI help?

[00:23:03] SERGEI IRISOV:
Yeah. So as you might imagine, the people in our company are quite motivated to achieve the result, whatever it takes, and it all started pretty hectic because people started to investigate on their own within the personal AI subscriptions and trying to find the answers personally somewhere at home.

Then quite quickly it was changed towards the cybersecurity risk, right? So it moved owards the next stage or the cybersecurity risk when, uh, we realized that our proprietary data is going towards the training of some models which people are just registering in for free. And that was a big risk for us, so we decided to invest a bit of a time towards that, and we started from a very simple solution because we had at that point of time a Microsoft environment built in.

We just bought the Copilot as a part of the environment and that was quite easy to onboard on because it was built in each and every application we had. So working with the Outlook, with emails, working with the Microsoft Suite around the Word, Excel and all those things became much easier. But at the same time, people were moaning that Copilot model is quite an older ones comparing to the ones that we have-

[00:24:11] MARIA MORRIS:
Yeah

[00:24:12] SERGEI IRISOV:
on our personal subscriptions. And we decided to move towards the hybrid approach because we cannot afford ourselves to buy the AI for everyone and forget about it because we need to build it gradually.

So we started from building up the training course on the AI awareness on the high level. So what it brings as a risk from the risk perspective, what it brings from the process perspective and so on and so forth. Just giving people the understanding that AI is not just you register it and start, uh, pointing to, uh, to, to all your files and it will give you all the answers. Because you still need to govern that, you still need to have the understanding of what is the next step and what was the step before.
And that's how we came up with the next step, getting the feedback from this training that we should ideally have the other models as well, and that's how we built the on-prem architecture.

[00:25:06] MARIA MORRIS:
Great. And one kind of follow-up question that I have on this, and it actually comes directly from some conversations that I've had recently on, on my own customer project, and that is how do we actually measure the value of AI or the return on investment?

So, you know, we're plugging in copilots already included in your suite instance, but when you start onboarding other tools, a lot of them are tokenized. So you're paying a certain amount of money per output, and organizations I think are finding it quite difficult to assess not only the value of the outputs, but then how much it's costing. So have you done much work in that area, kind of looking at what's your return on investment when it comes to your AI?

[00:25:46] SERGEI IRISOV:
I guess that's the top question at the moment all over. As we haven't got much people, many people within the company, it's actually personalized approach each and every time for now.

Because in each and every situation, the outcomes or the result that you're estimating the AI towards to is different. And within financial team, it's all about the one OKR. Within the, for example, test team who are analyzing a huge amount of data about getting the patterns of the test results is completely different. For the calculation guys, it's the third OKR. And those directions are quite different in a number of ways. So we haven't got any answer in particular for now, but we are aiming towards that.

[00:26:34] JOS VOSKUIL:
I think what I hear is, like many other companies, you're experiencing AI in the silo level. Every discipline finds AI solution to be more efficient, to work better, and sometimes I compare it with email.

When we start sending emails to each others, we were much more faster, but never on the management level there was a statement that we improved our business thanks to email. We still keep on working in the same siloed manner, only more efficient.

Do you see any attempts in the horizontal connection where disciplines get information that usually they wouldn't see before? Or are you not yet at that level of problems, because you talk already a lot with each other and you're a small company?

[00:27:17] SERGEI IRISOV:
Yeah, so that was one of the main things to establish while implementing the program management within the company. So one of the biggest task was honestly to involve the engineers. That means that we need to build up an additional branch of the program management free within the engineering environment, which would be the IT responsibility so we can book the time against that program and to prioritize that as well.

And that was achieved at some point of time, and that's how we've won a few additional people and some additional resources. But in terms of the horizontal collaboration, I guess we work quite close to it all the time because we are sitting all together. The majority of the people are sitting in one place, and there is another team who is working on the different topic sitting in the other place. So working on the same project was not a huge task for us because of that.

[00:28:13] JOS VOSKUIL:
Okay. So you're still in the lucky phase. Everything is overseeable or, uh-

[00:28:16] SERGEI IRISOV:
I guess so ...

[00:28:17] JOS VOSKUIL:
and scaling up. Which brings me somehow to my final wrap-up questions that I always ask, and luckily you have experience, because experience is what you get when you don't get what you expect. And I'm curious, can you share one of your experiences with us that shaped also your career and that can shape our one's, uh, career?

[00:28:36] SERGEI IRISOV:
So I'd rather bring two examples, and the first of them would be the previous job I had, which was a nuclear power plant building. So we were building non-nuclear part of the power plants for four different project within four different countries. And the longevity of the project is quite big, so it's about 25 years.

So basically the amount of collaboration between those different supply chains and between the different organizations within this project is just humongous. And within two years of my experience in this company, we moved from one system, from legacy system to the new system with those around 20 years of data.

And during my tenure at the company, not much has changed in the level of the projects. And that was an understanding that, for me, actually my projects, which are almost each and every time between three and five years, which I was considering quite long, is nothing compared to that. So there are some more projects, bigger projects for the whole generations, and that actually kind of gave me an understanding of my place in the world a bit, something like that. And the second bit that I wanted to mention is this multicultural experience that we've mentioned at the very beginning, which gave me a lot of opportunities to understand different people, different approaches.

And I guess this whole startup culture, along with this cultural experience, gave me the densest experience in my life. So that was the most colorful experience I might get even in my life, and that will definitely change my approach towards the next endeavors.

[00:30:19] JOS VOSKUIL:
Sounds like a, a wonderful experience. I think I share the same somehow in the beginning of my career also.

[00:30:24] MARIA MORRIS:
Definitely. Yeah, I think nowadays it's very rare to hear of people who are working in companies where, you know, everyone looks and sounds and speaks the same. So I think everyone has a similar experience to that.

But Sergei, to round us off, we've spoken about a variety of topics in this episode, and you've given some really great insights and advice. But if you had to break everything down, imagine you're a, a company that is just getting ready to start their PLM journey, their digital transformation journey, what's is the kind of main message or key reminder that you'd like to give them?

[00:30:59] SERGEI IRISOV:
Yeah. So the most important part is to build the building from the basement, right? If you realize what is must-have within your company, and you can break it down into the layers, that's the best option.

So realize your MVP. You realize your value as a company, then break it down into the MVP of the environment that is required for that, and prioritize those pieces into the phases. And start one by one, starting from not the most advanced technologies, but from the basic visibility and transparency.

[00:31:36] MARIA MORRIS:
Yeah. I really like that. I think that's a great way to close us off. Before I bid us farewell, Jos, is there anything, any last words that you'd like to share with us?

[00:31:45] JOS VOSKUIL:
No. Now I understand rocket science and PLM, so yes.

[00:31:49] MARIA MORRIS:
We know who to come to.

[00:31:50] JOS VOSKUIL:
Yeah. And maybe, Sergei, you want to tell us also how you spread your rocket science on YouTube as if those.

[00:31:56] MARIA MORRIS:
Yes. Maybe you can tell us a bit about that.

[00:31:59] SERGEI IRISOV:
Yeah. So recently I started my own journey within this whole YouTube environment, and during my career I was mentoring a bit of people within the companies, and my peers as well, and quite quickly I realized that the patterns of the mistakes that you can avoid at the very beginning are exactly or almost the same from company to company.

And I decided to just break it down somewhere, and then quite quickly realized that actually it is maybe easier to get some presentation and the talking head near it just to be more personalized. And that's what I've done. And if there is any chance you might be interested in how to build those basements and the different floors and layers, please feel free to approach the channel, and there is a structured course that I have for you.

[00:32:49] MARIA MORRIS:
Incredible. And for our listeners, I will share the link to Serge's YouTube channel in the description of this episode, so be sure to check him out. And then also reach out to him if you have any comments or questions after this episode, and also from exploring his YouTube channel.

So with that, I'd like to thank you very much, Serge, for joining us today. As Jos said, you're the first rocket scientist we've had. Hopefully now the first of many, because you've had a lot of amazing insight for us. And also a huge thank you to my co-host, as always, Jos. It's a pleasure doing these episodes with you.

And finally, to our listeners, thank you very much for tuning in. And as always, if you would like us to discuss any other topics, in particular on any upcoming episodes, then leave us a comment, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts about this episode. So with that, I wish you both a great day, and look forward to speaking again in the future. Maybe we need a part two.

[00:33:46] JOS VOSKUIL:
Okay. Thanks, Maria. Thanks, Serge.